Panel Has Shot At Curbing Gun Violence

Jim Spencer

Tomorrow is D-Day for the Hampton Coliseum Advisory Committee. Tomorrow, the committee's members must decide whether they want to recommend that the city of Hampton ban gun shows at its arena.

Publicly, committee members have said very little. Privately, they have agonized over issues of free speech and the right to bear arms. Meanwhile, the type of handgun that is readily and cheaply available at Coliseum gun shows was used to murder another local police officer.

At the last Coliseum gun show, May 1, I found several brands of .380 semiautomatic pistols, the kind of weapon used to murder Hampton Police Officer Kenny Wallace and, recently, Newport News Police Officer Larry Bland. These guns cost as little as $65.

If that was too stiff for your budget, you could have picked up a .25-caliber Saturday Night Special for 30 bucks.

For high rollers, dozens of Tec-9 and Tec-22 semiautomatic pistols dotted the displays.

There were "people killers" aplenty available at the last Coliseum gun show. So if the advisory committee is looking for a loophole to squeeze through, I'm going to offer one:

Don't ban gun shows at the Coliseum. Suspend them until the Peninsula goes a year without a handgun murder.

This sets a standard for restoring the shows. It doesn't affect the ability of gun show promoters to schedule exhibitions in private venues. It simply recognizes the link between guns and violence and gives members of the community, including those who cherish their right to keep and bear arms, a chance to work together to come up with a crime prevention program, not a crime reaction program.

Most important, for vacillating members of the Coliseum Advisory Committee, suspending an activity until the violence attending it subsides is not unprecedented. A couple of years ago the Hampton arena temporarily banned rap shows because of fights in the parking lot.

Guns sold at the Coliseum travel far beyond the parking lot. Opponents of gun control have succeeded in keeping the State Police from accumulating information that would show if any of those guns have been used in crimes. The public records the state cops are allowed to store are so general and fragmented that a State Police supervisor told me I would have to pay $500 just to get a list of the licensed gun dealers and a generic description of the weapons they sold at the Coliseum.

There is no record of the business done by unlicensed salesmen I saw walking around the Coliseum brandishing single weapons they hoped to sell. Again, this is because opponents of gun control - the people who patronize the Coliseum gun shows - want to keep the cops from knowing.

Today, WAVY-TV once again tries to get weapons off the street by trading "Goods for Guns."

Tomorrow, the Coliseum Advisory Committee decides if it wants Hampton to contribute additional firepower to a country that already has more guns than people and is slowly bleeding to death.

Those who claim gun shows at the Coliseum don't add to the bloodshed in America are wrong.

Shows like the ones in the Coliseum offer antiques and hunting paraphernalia, but their biggest byproducts are fear, anger and hatred.

These emotions took many forms at the Coliseum earlier this month. It wasn't just the tables filled with weapons of every shape and description - the Cigs, Colts, Berettas and Smith & Wessons. It was a whole mentality that turned a city-owned arena into a giant cement bunker bursting with paranoia.

Videotapes of the "Hellfire system" ran constantly on TV monitors in different parts of the arena. They featured a man squeezing off hundreds of rounds of ammunition from flat black, fully automatic weapons.

Shelves of books by a variety of authors shared a single theme: The only way to get even is to hurt someone.

To display a $5 polycarbon "letter opener," a vendor rammed it through a half-inch piece of plywood.

In every corner of the Coliseum on Sunday, the message was the same:

The U.S. is a country of predators feeding off everyone else. If you're a law-abiding citizen, there is only one solution. Arm yourself and be prepared to shoot.

The problem with this "us" vs. "them" approach is that there are so many of "them." The enemy includes not only thieves and thugs, but also liberals, homosexuals, "the bitch Jane Fonda" and African Americans.

I bought a couple of bumper stickers at the gun show just to have proof that they were actually for sale.

One features a confederate flag and the inscription, "If I had known this, I would have picked my own cotton."

The other says "WORK. It's the white thing to do."

Letting someone make money selling such bigotry in a city-owned facility in Hampton, a community which is 38 percent black, stretches the First Amendment of the Constitution - the one guaranteeing free speech - to its limit.

Couple the scapegoat mentality with the clear implication that might makes right and the Second Amendment of the Constitution - the one guaranteeing the right to bear arms - becomes a license for violence.

Any public body that knows this and continues to allow its facilities to promote such savagery produces a community where no one wants to live. And, in the bitter end, a place where no one can.